The fallow time

Jill Severn portrait

It’s hard to enjoy winter, especially when it’s damp and dreary for days on end. Northwest natives often take pride in our purported fondness for this season, but right now many of us are faking it. We’d really rather be somewhere sunny.

It’s true that there are birds to watch, branching patterns to admire in bare trees, and a winter festival of mosses, lichens and fungi. But some days – many days, actually – it’s just not enough to lift the thick grey fog that settles over us.

We go fallow: uncultivated, disconnected, uninterested. We’re not depressed exactly; we’re just disengaged. Contrary to our regional reputation, we become more inclined to take a nap than to rev up with another cup of coffee.

For most of us, this fallow season started in mid-December, as we sank into ever-shorter days and ever-longer nights. And now, in early January, we’re not over it yet. The solstice came and went, but the days haven’t gotten longer enough to notice. By now, we can identify a hundred shades of gray, and none of them is the least bit erotic. On one exceptionally damp, bone-chilling, dark grey day, it felt like someone should call the cosmic ambulance: the earth was in danger of flat-lining.

But that day passed, and now here we are, feeling a little disoriented in a new year. We find ourselves in the fog, asking, “What is it that’s new?”

The answers to that question comprise such a weighty list we’d rather sit quietly by a fire. Artificial intelligence, the future of the Middle East, Ukraine v. Putin, climate issues, what we’re learning from the James Webb Telescope – they’ll just have to wait until there’s more light.

A part of our problem is that we have the new year marker in the wrong place. The Gregorian calendar puts it about ten days after the solstice, when early astronomers could tell the days were getting longer. The problem was – and still is – that the non-astronomer majority is not excited by a few extra seconds a day and so often finds the New Year’s holiday hollow and disappointing.

Other culture’s calendars do a better job of deciding when a year has gone by. The Jewish calendar starts the new year in the fall, when the year’s crops have ripened and the seeds for next year’s crop are stored away. That’s very sensible. Some people mark the passage of time by changes in the sun; others rely on the moon. Many Asian cultures celebrate the new year in later January or February, when the days are noticeably longer, and there’s more to celebrate.

Poor dear us. Our holidays are over, the darkness and the weather are awfulness squared, and there’s nothing in our mainstream culture to cheer us up.

Fortunately, there are seed catalogues. I’m reading one that sells mysterious “cave beans,” the progeny of seeds “reputedly” found in a 1500-year-old New Mexican pot sealed with pitch. This big fat catalogue includes seeds from specialty firms from around the world. Among other exotic vegetables, they carry seeds for deep purple-black carrots from India, and for Filderkraut cabbage from the south of Germany, which is said to produce 10-pound pointed heads.

It's a quirky, chaotic mix, with a huge selection of tomatoes but only two varieties of broccoli. It’s great fun, and it will spark your imagination.

That’s the signal service that a seed catalogue can provide in January. Awakening our imagination is the first step in slowly, gently reviving the fallow gardener.

A fallow field, after all, is never really idle. The purpose of fallowing a field is to give it time to rest and rejuvenate itself. The point that’s easy to miss is that if resting is rejuvenating, then resting is doing something. Fallow and idle may look alike, but they won’t for long.

In a fallow field, seeds blow in on the wind, or are dropped by birds. Some of those seeds germinate and grow without anyone intending it. One might be an oak tree; others might be dogwoods, or colonies of trilliums or wild roses. Often the earth does its best work on ground humans might see as fallow.

Often our minds also do their best work when we just leave them open and still, waiting for whatever blows in, and for the wheel of time to turn a little further towards the light.

Happy New Year, whenever it starts for you.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com